Podcast: “Choosing a Surgical Location” with Dr. Vickery

New York Plastic Surgeon Dr. Carlin Vickery explains what goes into choosing a plastic surgery location, as well as what brought her to starting 5th Avenue Millenium Aesthetic Surgery in New York City.

5th Avenue has been here for over 15 years, and the reason that motivated me to go ahead and create my own facility was that although I was on the full-time faculty at a very well-known major institution, I did not feel that I was able, on a day to day basis, to guarantee the attention to detail that I felt both my reconstructive and cosmetic patients were optimally getting for the optimal experience.

Plastic surgery, or the nature of plastic surgery, whether it be reconstructive surgery or whether it be cosmetic surgery, are instruments and the finer points of achieving the optimal results require having a staff that is very very familiar with the instrumentation, maintaining it, we use fine instruments it’s as simple as how the instruments are washed, whether or not they are washed very delicately, whether the tips of these instruments are in their optimal care. In a big institution, the frustration that I ran into is that frequently plastic surgery patients are the healthiest patients within the hospital. There are liver transplants, there’s heart transplants, they’re complicated GI patients, and plastic surgery patients tend to be the healthiest.

As a result, we frequently within that environment, particularly cosmetic cases, are given staff which is more of the float staff, meaning that the heart patients are going to have a regular staff that only works with them. The orthopedic people are staff that only work with them, but the hospital because it’s a big hospital and they think that our patients are the healthiest, they are more likely to give their more random staff. And yes, you can make it work, but there’s no question that that creates wear and tear on the instruments as well as wear and tear on the physician, so that if I have a float staff which is randomly assigned I have to bring them up to speed at the beginning of the case. I can do it, but it’s not the ideal and certainly is not how I wish to spend my time. I would rather be able to walk into an operating room and know that I have people that are totally familiar with my instruments and maintain them to the standards that I wish.

Plastic surgery, as with all surgery, but what we do is very nit picky and the attention to detail is critically important and that really goes with preoperative planning, intraoperative, execution as well as post-operative planning. Neatness counts and the only way to achieve that is if all of those details are looked after and it is very difficult with a major institution to achieve that to the level that I find important. And so within 5th Avenue, I was able to build an environment and have staff and have equipment that achieves that everyday, and allows my patients to be the beneficiary of that effort.Google